Connecting Oracle RMAN

In this article we will understand about Oracle RMAN utlity and how to connect RMAN to target database.

• RMAN utility comes with Oracle Binaries

• No special installation or license required for using RMAN

• At command prompt, you can just type rman and the utility will start

• By default, it connects to database environmental variables defined

• RMAN is used only when your DB is in at least Mount stage

• RMAN is used while the DB is up and running and have a very little performance impact if backup is running

Connecting RMAN

If you want to connect to the RMAN utility, you can simply type “rman target /” and it will connect to the default database variables that are exported in your environment.

Let us check the environmental variables in our database

rman-connect

The variables are set to proddb. Now if we type rman target / , it will connect to the proddb database

rman-target

Let us say that you don’t want to connect to proddb but to any other database instance which is running on this server

You can connect to any database on the same server by following the steps:

# rman

RMAN> connect target sys@testdb

target database password:

But in real time, DBAs don’t use the above method. They will export the environmental variables and then connect to the correct database.